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Learning Like a State: Statecraft in the Digital Age

Learning Like a State: Statecraft in the Digital Age

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Like all modern organizations, modern states are subject to a “data imperative”: a mandate to mine data and to decide what to manage based on what can be measured. In service of data-hungry machine learning techniques, the state (and its contractors) find themselves compelled not only to seek and demand new kinds of data, but also to mine it in a somewhat agnostic fashion to find the relations that stick. It is no longer necessary to flatten society to make it legible (as high modernism required); instead, ubiquitous data capture means that categories emerge inductively from regularities observed in the data.

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Climate Change and Racial Capitalism
Symposia

Climate Change and Racial Capitalism

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Despite the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations who have been largely ignored due to their racialization, legal scholarship on climate displacement has often adopted a doctrinal approach that fails to analyze the underlying systemic causes of the climate crisis and its relationship to race and racism.

The Functional Logic of Antitrust: Oligarchy vs. Democracy
Symposia

The Functional Logic of Antitrust: Oligarchy vs. Democracy

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The reinterpretation of antitrust in terms of “consumer welfare” has not resulted in bountiful consumer welfare, but oligarchy unleashed. But, as I wrote in the Journal of Law and Political Economy, antitrust can be a force for fairness and democracy again. A reimagined antitrust law that restricts consolidation of business assets and permits certain. . .

A Labor Theory of Negotiation: From Integration to Value Creation
Symposia

A Labor Theory of Negotiation: From Integration to Value Creation

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American negotiation theory started as, and for a long time remained, an engagement with labor and class relations. When early scholars developed their theories of negotiation in the context of workplace conflict, they did so in a moment when many workers were familiar enough with Marxist theories of class struggle to readily believe that some differences—for example,. . .

Different Paths: Colonization is More than Exploitation
Symposia

Different Paths: Colonization is More than Exploitation

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It is an exercise in futility to accept the legitimacy of colonial constructs such as race, gender, property, and state sovereignty, and then work to equalize relations defined in these terms. These constructs are, themselves, the “master’s tools,” designed to perpetuate relations of domination and subordination. Moreover, a more equitable division of. . .

Planting an Orchard
Essays

Planting an Orchard

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Through a progressive approach to designing policy feedback loops with communities and their organizations, we can create and win policies that both meet the immediate material needs and redistribute political and economic power more equitably.

Toward a Democratic Political Economy for the First Amendment
Essays

Toward a Democratic Political Economy for the First Amendment

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The key to understanding the connection between rights and material conditions is a conception of democracy…. people who are suffering from certain basic forms of deprivation and disadvantage will find it impossible to exercise fundamental rights and they will be unable to participate meaningfully in the project of cooperative government. Liberties may. . .

The Capital Commons, Part 2: How Best to Manage Public Capital
Essays

The Capital Commons, Part 2: How Best to Manage Public Capital

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In Part 1 of this two-part post, I explained that, owing to its endogeneity and consequent vulnerability to what I call Recursive Collective Action Predicaments, monetized public capital must, if it is to be productively rather than merely speculatively deployed, be publicly managed, while privately intermediated capital may be privately managed.I then. . .

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